"But you can be, sometimes. Please, tone it down a bit. We're meeting new people, and they don't all look very appreciative of eccentricity."

"No accounting for taste, that."

"Vincente!"

"Va bene.

Art eyed his companion warily, before finally nodding. Cautiously, he knocked on the door several times, still keeping an eye on the taller man standing near him. Vincente looked positively cadaverous - with his sallow skin stretched taut over his bony face, and that vaguely old-fashioned attire he was wearing (Art never asked or looked, but he knew that that pocket-watch must be languishing in one of the coat's superfluous pockets by now) - he looked quite like a wendigo. Or rather, Art reconsidered, like Jack Skellington. But presently the door was opened, and Art found his train of thought interrupted by a young man who had opened it.

"Hello," he said.

"Good afternoon," Art made an effort to look friendly. He had hoped that his more talkative companion would take the wheel, but Vincente seemed presently busy with observing their host's details and unlikely to talk any time soon. "We're here for the book club."

"Oh," their host replied simply. He held the door ajar a bit wider. "Come in, then. Fyodor Waller, by the way."

"Art Dyers, and this is my friend, Vincente."

But presently Vincente had stuck out his hand in a suddenly debonair gesture. "Vincente Jarvis' the name. How'd you do?"

Fyodor shook the offered hand. "What's up? Right this way, if you will."

The three of them marched up a flight of stairs, then entered into another door. As soon as Fyodor ushered them in, Art instantly knew that Vincente must be doing his favourite past-time again, for his eyes had suddenly grown much quicker, so much that any words on his part would be lost to oblivion.

"Hi, Art," a female voice called out from one of the chairs in the room. Art looked round and soon found it to come from the cheery-faced, voluminous-haired Anna Davis.

"Hi, Anna," he gave her a nod of the head. Giving a slight nudge to Vincente's elbow, he approached two empty chairs and sat down, making sure that his companion will do the same. Suddenly, though, Vincente made a start and had greeted their neighbour.

"I say, we met at the party that other day, didn't we? Spencer Montgomery, was it?"

LaReAn omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.